Tag: insurrection

Insurrectionists and the Supreme Court

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled by a vote of 4-3 that Donald Trump cannot appear on the Republican primary ballot in that state because he is disqualified under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The relevant part of the 14th Amendment says:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector
of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military,
under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously
taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United
States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or
judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United
States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the
same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress
may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

It’s a long ruling – 134 pages for the majority opinion alone – and very thorough. It even quotes a ruling by Justice Gorsuch from back when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Of course, it’s only the opinion of one state supreme court out of fifty.

Even the legal analysts who think the Colorado court is right are pretty sure the U.S. Supreme Court is going to overturn it. And many of them are also arguing that even if the Colorado court is right on the facts and on its interpretation of the Amendment – and I think they are – it would still be better to defeat Trump’s authoritarian extremism at the ballot box rather than in the courts.

They have a point, but I disagree. I don’t think it’s good for the country to allow a vote on its destruction and that is precisely what we get if Trump is allowed to run.  Our fundamental democracy should not be put up for a vote.

We settled this matter by putting down the rebellion in our Civil War that ended in 1865. We passed the 14th amendment after that to make sure that those who were part of an insurrection could not hold political office. We also passed it, along with the 13th and 15th, to change some of the fundamental rules of our country that were adopted in compromise with enslavers when the Constitution was first written.

We should not have to fight that battle again. The fact that we are struggling with these issues 150 years after the decisive victory over the rebel states in the Civil War is due to our politicians and our courts not following through on either Reconstruction or those three significant amendments that expand the rights of all Americans. Continue reading “Insurrectionists and the Supreme Court”…

Lawyers Destroying Themselves

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Law is inherently conservative.

By conservative, I mean two non-exclusive things:

  • It prefers the status quo.
  • It favors the elites, as in the well-known quote from the French novelist Anatole France:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

I was once helping my father with a minor legal issue in his business. I told him he had to do such and such. He told me J.P. Morgan expected his lawyers to fix things, not tell him he had to follow the law. I told him he wasn’t J.P. Morgan.

I am quite sure that J.P. Morgan got away with all kinds of things and that his lawyers helped him do it. He was incredibly rich and powerful.

But even though law favors the powerful, even as we can all cite numerous examples of wealthy people doing terrible things and getting away with it, there are limits to how far lawyers can go even on behalf of such people.

As I watch all the lawyers caught up in the many criminal cases against our former grifter-in-chief, I find myself shocked that so many people who once had sterling, establishment careers were willing to throw those over to support a con man. I mean, these are supposedly conservatives. Right-wing extremists, to be sure, people who advocate authoritarian government, but still, conservatives.

I did not expect to find such people throwing away their careers in an effort to block an election and destroy our democracy.

John Eastman had a cushy job at the Claremont Institute. He had a reputation among those who think the Federalist Society makes sense. All he had to do was share his outrageous positions in the form of, say, law review articles and op-eds, rather than positioning them as legal advice and trying to convince other people — notably Mike Pence — to do illegal things to try to block the will of the people.

And Rudy Giuliani was the former mayor of NYC and a former U.S. attorney. He’s an asshole, sure, but all he had to do was stay out of all this and many people would still think he was a hero because of September 11.

I have no idea what they thought was in it for them. It’s not like Trump has ever been loyal to people who sacrifice themselves for him. Continue reading “Lawyers Destroying Themselves”…

Insurrection at the Capitol

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I was not one of those people who said after the disastrous election in 2016, “It’s just four years. How much harm can he do?”

I was, in fact, terrified of just how much harm he could do. Looking back, the only thing I would say is that I wasn’t terrified enough.

In 2000, after the Supreme Court handed the election to another incompetent man, I was angry, but assured myself that we could survive that. A year later, I realized my mistake. Even after the election of Barack Obama, I was not optimistic that the damage caused by Junior Bush would ever be repaired.

Then we got a narcissistic criminal who wanted to be king. He never cared about policy, only about self-glorification. Others used that to get some policies they wanted, causing vast harm to our already shaky country.

The only good thing that came out of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by right-wing terrorists on Wednesday is that a number of people who had been acting for years as if things were normal have finally realized the error of their ways. Of course, they don’t have to do much about it now.

Though maybe one other good thing has come out of the last four years: Many more people are now aware of the deep flaws in our country and how rooted they are in racism. Continue reading “Insurrection at the Capitol”…